I finally succumbed and bought myself a new phone (Motorola Defy) as the battery life on my ancient one was getting less and less every day.

Mostly I bought the Defy for the water-resistance / gorilla glass etc. but since it's running Android, has a GPS and has navigation capabilities, I figured I'd give the cycling apps a go.

The one I downloaded (b.icycle) seems...OK, it managed to pull out some plausible stats on my ride home on Friday (heh, fixie top speed of 40km/h on 40/16 gearing) but the GPS radio seems a little flaky at times, takes quite a while to initially acquire the signal in b.icycle compared to the ordinary navigation applications.

Has anybody else tried this stuff or does everybody own a Garmin or an iPhone?

So we get the leaders we deserve and we elect, we get the companies and the products that we ask for, right? And we have to ask for different things. – Paul Gildingbut really, that's rubbish. We get none of it because the choices are illusory.

B.icycle is simple enough to use (start/stop/ autostop, has a live map, records multiple trips, lets you name routes, records times, distances, elevation, metres climbed and descended).

I guess the biggest problem is: as a training aid, what features are important other than the sorts of things I can already do with a bike computer. The metres climbed one was pretty interesting to me but I'm just not sure how useful it is.

So we get the leaders we deserve and we elect, we get the companies and the products that we ask for, right? And we have to ask for different things. – Paul Gildingbut really, that's rubbish. We get none of it because the choices are illusory.

well your one does sound better than sporty pal and im going to download it right now and try it out. what more do you need than what you described. I like sportypal because its easy to use has most of the features you just described, however it doesnt have elevation which I want.

I've pretty much given up using the phone as a live cycling computer, the battery life with the display on even part of the time is not good enough (I have a Hero, a year old now). I use it to record longer rides, not the regular bunch rides or races, and now use either Cardiotrainer or Google's My Tracks. My Tracks because it was recommended by Strava, a web based ride analysis thing I just started trying out. My Tracks doesn't really interface to Strava, it just lets you email a GPX file to anyone and Strava accepts uploads this way. Cardiotrainer is better in that it automatically uploads when you're done but the web based analysis is not so good as Strava.

The killer feature of Strava for me is that it lets you mark out 'segments' of your ride (eg. climbs) and then finds everyone who's done that segment and lets you compare times. I've been looking for an android app that would keep track of my climbs without having to manually mark them every time. This works really well, plus i I change my phone or method of recording GPX files, it should still work - all the others are tied to one phone platform pretty much.

Battery life seems to be a bummer on the Moto Defy with WiFi and GPS enabled, but if you drop the WiFi it doesn't seem too bad - enough for a GPS'd bunch ride I think.

The idea of a comparo against other riders sounds kinda OK, but frankly if you want to have a go around here, you'll know pretty soon once you pop out of the bunch how well you're doing as they whoosh past, so that isn't wouldn't be so useful to a (ahem) c grader.

What I really want is a "ghosted", post-ride account, or a logged time up those climbs. I think I can futz that with b.icycle but it'll take a few rides to work it out to see whether it can be synthesized from the results. There doesn't seem to be a ghosted kinda mode in it but you would think it wouldn't be hard to add to a cycling app.

So we get the leaders we deserve and we elect, we get the companies and the products that we ask for, right? And we have to ask for different things. – Paul Gildingbut really, that's rubbish. We get none of it because the choices are illusory.

I tried out My Tracks (up) and B.icycle (back) yesterday on a trip to Swansea, 20km each way. I have a HTC Desire. Just a couple of differences - My Tracks used about 10% of the battery whereas B.icycle used approx 16% (phone was at 53% when I left for the ride). My Tracks shows the following: Total DistanceTotal TimeMoving TimeNumber of TracksAverage SpeedAverage Moving SpeedElevation GainMin ElevationMax ElevationB.icycle does not take into consideration the stops, but it does have calories.My Tracks, easy to use, email the track to your Google account it the appears in Google Docs as a spread sheet and you can use Google Maps to view it and share with others if you like, I'm going to go with this one.

Edit: By the way each test was for one hour, I sat at Macca's having a coffee until the hour clicked over, then on the way home cut the side out of the tyre and limped home, 1 hour again.

Quote: "Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer"Instructions for Life: Dalai LamaAvanti Cadent 1.0 2011

brewski wrote:My Tracks used about 10% of the battery whereas B.icycle used approx 16% (phone was at 53% when I left for the ride).

OK, download time then - b.icycle is a total battery hog and it left me with gaps where it can't get the GPS signal on the Moto Defy, whereas the other navigation apps have no trouble at all. I'll send 'em a note about it but will be trying My Tracks I think. b.icycle also seems to take forever still to acquire it's location.

So we get the leaders we deserve and we elect, we get the companies and the products that we ask for, right? And we have to ask for different things. – Paul Gildingbut really, that's rubbish. We get none of it because the choices are illusory.

I tried SportsTracker for 2 days (been using SportyPal). I'm on the Nokia platform though, not Android. The interface is not as neat as SportyPal's but it has one important feature SportyPal lacks - auto pause. Below 2km/h (you can set a different value), for example, the timing pauses and resumes again once the speed is above that which gives you your riding time rather then total time. However, SportsTracker doesn't allow the screen to switch off, draining the battery. It's not too bad, but still, a bit lame. I think I'll go back to SportyPal.

EDIT: The screen turns off fine, I think I was just activating it when taking the phone out of my pocket at the end of the ride. I'm sticking with SportsTracker, I like it, even the website is good.

OK, I used b.Icycle today on a proper ride (not just tooling around town) and I'm warming up to it. Managed to track everything without any problems, gives good times, average speeds, elevation readings, emails you the KML file you can load into Google Earth. Other than the battery issues it's not bad. I have sent off a query to the b.icycle people about that to see what they reckon (they may not have tested the app on a Moto Defy, one problem with Android phones is the huge differences in hardware).

Really, it's pretty impressive. Perhaps not as good as buying a Garmin product, but given a few months I think either Garmin will have to release a phone, merge with Powertap or be out of business.

So we get the leaders we deserve and we elect, we get the companies and the products that we ask for, right? And we have to ask for different things. – Paul Gildingbut really, that's rubbish. We get none of it because the choices are illusory.

drubie wrote:Really, it's pretty impressive. Perhaps not as good as buying a Garmin product, but given a few months I think either Garmin will have to release a phone, merge with Powertap or be out of business.

drubie wrote:Really, it's pretty impressive. Perhaps not as good as buying a Garmin product, but given a few months I think either Garmin will have to release a phone, merge with Powertap or be out of business.

Hmm - too car oriented for me. I reckon the perfect setup would be a bluetooth, bike computer head unit with speed and cadence and HR displayed that spoke enough bluetooth to your smart phone to allow synchronous recording. That way, the phone stays in the pocket, happily mapping away, while the small display did the "immediate" stuff. Have your HR mapped against the GPS readings, you wouldn't need a powertap.

So we get the leaders we deserve and we elect, we get the companies and the products that we ask for, right? And we have to ask for different things. – Paul Gildingbut really, that's rubbish. We get none of it because the choices are illusory.

I tried MyTracks and wasn't very impressed with it - it draws a very jagged path on my phone, gets the average speed very wrong, gets the top and lowest speeds very wrong as it tries to interpolate between obviously incorrect readings. b.iCycle does a better job of ignoring obviously wrong location samples and is just as flexible when it comes to exporting the track to other software.

So we get the leaders we deserve and we elect, we get the companies and the products that we ask for, right? And we have to ask for different things. – Paul Gildingbut really, that's rubbish. We get none of it because the choices are illusory.

I've used My Tracks and found it to be accurate enough. I have compared it over the same route on 2 different bikes each bike fitted with a different computer.All 3 devices were within 100 metres over the 35 Km route and average and top speeds were all very close.However that was only on rides where My Tracks recorded the whole ride. More often than not My Tracks would stop recording part way through a ride making it useless.

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